One of the horror genre's "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer's Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Cult Movie Review: The Apparition (2012)

At
just barely eighty-two minutes in duration, The Apparition, a 2012 horror
movie from director Todd Lincoln, is an absolutely bare bones affair. It features paper-thin characters, cardboard
performances, and no meaningful third act or denouement.

And
yet -- though unexcavated -- there is
the seed, at least, of something intriguing in The Apparition.

In
particular, the movie creeps up to the outer edge of ingenuity and imagination
by conceiving of an incorporeal entity from another plane of existence, perhaps
the after-life.

However,
other than a few speculations about this entity’s nature, and the dimension
from which it hails, the movie doesn’t explore the notion of such life in any
significant or interesting way.

Instead,
all the big fright moments seem transplanted from popular horror films of the
last decade, especially of the Japanese remake variety. A maleficent spot or stain on the ceiling may
remind you of Dark Water (2005). A
scene with a female wraith crawling out into the open near a washing machine
recalls a key (trademark) moment from The Ring (2002). And the film’s closing image harks back to
Sarah Michelle Gellar’s final scene in The Grudge (2004).

Finally,
The
Apparition throws in the occasional “found footage” touches, and you
realize you’re trapped in the same narrow, predictable “jump scare” vein of
your average Paranormal Activity sequel. A horror film that might have
explored the idea of other planes of existence with awe and wonder as well as
terror instead charts terrain you already probably know pretty well.

So
-- no bones about it -- The Apparition is not a very
satisfying horror film.

And
yet, one feels as though there might once have been more meat upon the film’s
mostly-naked bones. You might even
detect some of that missing dramatic material in the theatrical trailer or
preview, posted below on the blog. The
preview suggests a whole thematic through-line about “belief” manifesting or
changing the nature of reality. But that
premise is hardly in the movie at all, likely excised at some point late in the
game.

You
can’t judge a movie on what’s not in it, of course, but you can still evince some
sympathy for those involved with the resulting debacle. I had the strong, almost unshakeable feeling
watching The Apparition that it had been butchered in post-production,
with almost all sense of nuance and humanity lopped out to make it nothing more
than a routine, easily-digestible scare show.
I could be wrong, of course.
Maybe The Apparition is just generally awful. But the previews, at least, suggest to me
that there is a more interesting film in there somewhere, hoping to escape.

The
Apparition
begins with a title card and flashback involving a super-8 film of an infamous (though
fictitious) seance in the early 1970s.
There, a group of scientists attempted to contact the soul of their
recently-dead colleague, Charles Reamer. They get more than they expect in response.

Then
we arrive at a modern college campus, where students use “science” (here,
little more than a form of technobabble magic…) to recreate the experiment,
only with five-hundred times the mental strength of the original.

The misguided experiment brings a malevolent entity
through a “rift,” and that entity “takes” one of the students, Lydia (Julianna
Guill), back into its reality, where she disappears.

A
few years pass, and the students, led by Patrick (Tom Felton) now attempt to
contain the entity, which is still on the loose. The attempt fails.

Meanwhile,
Ben (Sebastian Stan), one of the students who participated in the experiment,
has moved on with his life. He’s now
dating Kelly (Ashley Greene), and together they have moved into an “investment
house” owned by her parents.

Before
long however, the malevolent entity comes looking for Ben, and seems to be
obsessed with Kelly…

The
Apparition begins
with two scenes that serve an identical purpose: establishing the fact that
paranormal entities exist. These scenes
fail to scare because in both instances there is no build-up, and we know none
of the protagonists by name. It’s all
just paranormal pandemonium. It’s all
effects, in other words, and the effects aren’t that impressive because we don’t
even know who’s at risk, or why they are at risk, or even why the risk is
worthwhile.

Watching
these moments, I wondered, at least initially, if there was a method to this
madness; if The Apparition was seeking to go beyond simple scares in the
early scenes and escort us, full bore, into the world of that unseen force,
that evil paranormal entity. Perhaps it
was taking the paranormal as a given, and then moving forward to explore that
terrain?

But
of course, that doesn’t happen.

The
first two scenes are merely repetitive ones that laboriously lay the groundwork
for the central narrative, but which fail to elicit goose bumps. The whole Charles Reamer subplot could be
taken out of the film, actually, and its absence would, essentially, change
nothing.

Then,
about half-way through The Apparition our man of
exposition, the student scientist Patrick provides us some more information
about the monster. The entity is not
only present in our world…it can re-shape
or manipulate our reality. This
means that, in a critical moment, Kelly traps herself in the laundry room with
the monster by mistake. Or that, in
another scene, Ben finds himself sleeping on a motel room ceiling, watching
helplessly as the demon shrink-wraps Kelly in a normal bed-sheet-turned-fly-paper.

Obviously,
any entity with the capacity to re-shape our reality to this degree is going to
be impossible to defeat, at least by three none-too-bright twenty-year olds. And yet the monster uses its
admittedly-awesome powers entirely inconsistently and often illogically.

Sometimes,
the entity kills people out-right, leaving their corpses behind. Sometimes it drags people out of our reality,
into its reality…and they are never seen again.

The
entity also kills a dog, oddly, without seeming to lift even one malevolent
finger. One of the film’s most
unintentionally funny lines involves the dog’s owner, a little girl, telling
Kelly “Your house killed my dog.”

Good
luck proving that in a court of law, sister! The dog just sits down on the laundry room linoleum,
and then Kelly notes -- bafflingly-- that it’s suddenly on the verge of death. We have to take her word for it, however,
because the dog doesn’t bark, yelp, or otherwise appear to suffer in the
slightest. It just gingerly sits down,
as if the entity ordered it to “Sit!”

The
malevolent entity’s motives and reasoning are not exactly clear or consistent
in The
Apparition, indeed. Is the dog really a threat?

Also,
the entity desires to come into our world, apparently, yet it is already,
undeniably, present in our world. It never tries to “possess” a person or body,
although it does, apparently, demonically possess a security/video camera (in
another ludicrous scene…). Without
housing itself in a human body, how much more “in the world” can the Entity
get? It can already grow mold on every
surface imaginable (like soap and linoleum) and re-shape the perimeters of reality. It can already reach out and grope final
girls in tent displays at Costco. What
does it want, the vote?

The
Apparition
has a lot of problems like that.

First,
the film doesn’t explain why the entity must limit itself to terrorizing those
who were involved with the experiment.
And then it breaks that rule by killing the dog and chasing Kelly, two
acts which suggest the entity can go after anyone or anything. Perhaps that’s the hook for the sequel?

But if the entity can attack anyone, why is it
bothering with Kelly at all? She has
absolutely nothing to do with its presence in our world. Speaking of which, why is the Entity
punishing its benefactors at all, the very people who allowed it a gateway into
this mortal coil we call life? That’s
like biting the hand that feeds you, or holds the door open for you.

But
here’s the rub, incongruities and all, The Apparition does indeed possess
some nifty visualizations. Not many, but
at least a few.

When
the entity moves through our reality, for instance, it’s like our reality
becomes malleable. In the entity’s catastrophic wake, reality
re-shapes in weird, unsettling ways.
During one moment, we see Lydia torn out of our reality, right through a
solid wall. In another moment, we see a
corrupted house interior where everything is disordered, and television sets,
tables, chairs and other furniture have been sort of molecularly-blended with
the walls themselves. These moments are
powerful ones, and suggest how fragile our “reality” is.

While
watching the film, I really hoped that The Apparition was going to follow
through on its story, and reveal fully the “other side,” the reality from which
the monster hails. At one point, Lydia
returns to our world as a kind of ashy wraith, as if she has lived for years in
that “other space” and is now pushing her way back to ours.

It
would have been very intriguing to see Kelly sucked into the other world too,
and have to navigate its physical laws and rules. In fact, for a few moments I thought the film’s
punch-line was going to be that the evil entity is just a dead human soul trying to get back here. Maybe it was obsessed with the experimenters
because it was actually Lydia…desperately trying to reach home, desperately
trying to take back the life that was stolen from her..

But
the movie never comes up with any plot point that clever, and so all the
Charles Reamer material at the beginning is absolutely meaningless. No one ever explains why that one séance (out
of the hundreds that have been conducted in the last two centuries…) should
open a rift, and why Patrick’s experiments should further open the same
rift. Nothing connects.

The
whole “if you believe, you die” paradigm -- the
film’s ad-line -- is also totally unexplored. Nobody stops and tries not to believe in the entity.
Indeed, the movie accepts -- and asks you to accept -- from frame one
that the supernatural is real. There is
precious little if any discussion of belief as a motivating factor of creation
in the film, if memory serves.

The
Apparition
is an absolute mess, but it reminds me of the old adage that the best criticism
of a movie is to make another movie you like better.

Someone
in Hollywood needs to take the ideas just barely brought up in The
Apparition -- of a rift between realities -- and explore that aspect of
the narrative. What if someone who wasn’t supposed to die fell through into
that other world, and started haunting our reality, at least around the
edges? That could be a moving and
terrifying story.

A
horror movie that looks beyond our understanding of the boundaries of death
could be a scary and fascinating one indeed, and not just a Paranormal
Activity on the cheap. Unfortunately, The Apparition isn’t that
movie.

2 comments:

I saw this film 2 weeks ago and literally cannot remember the ending or much of this film. This film started like a knockoff of 'Flatliners' and ended like 'Modern Horror Movie', meaning totally forgettable. I now think that most directors of this decade have a fundamental lack of understanding of how to build a horror film. With films like 'The Apparition' and war-horses like Craven & Carpenter now in their 70's, the future of horror looks very bleak indeed.

I did hear from a DISH co-worker that the entity in The Apparition didn’t seem to be well explained in terms of its purpose. That saddens me a little because Ashley Greene is a great actress but if the plot doesn’t work, it just doesn’t work. My friends still want to see it even though I advised them that several people didn’t deem it worthy but I gave up. I added the film to my DISH Blockbuster @Home movie queue and it should be here within the next couple of days. The great thing about Blockbuster is that it lets me choose from over 100,000 movies in the comfort of my own home.

About John

award-winning author of 27 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).

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